MOSCOW – The Kremlin on Monday issued several sharp, successive denials to questions of whether a senior aide to then president-elect Donald Trump convinced Russian President Vladimir Putin not to retaliate to sanctions issued by then President Barack Obama.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov told reporters during a daily conference call that the answer was no, and for several reasons.

The Kremlin doesn’t know anything about the talks with Michael Flynn because they were conducted by the Foreign Ministry, he told reporters during a conference call on Monday. Go ask them.

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, second from left, and Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak, right, arrive at the State Department in Washington, Monday, July 17, 2017, to meet with Undersecretary of State Thomas Shannon.(AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

Anyway, Flynn wasn’t in a position to be making proposals to Sergey Kislyak, then the Russian ambassador, the spokesman continued, and they certainly wouldn’t have been passed along to the president.

And finally, Putin “makes decisions on his own,” he added, guided only by Russia’s national interests.

In conclusion? “It is completely absurd,” Peskov, the spokesman, said.

There was little doubt the Kremlin would deny having any information about the allegations against Flynn, even as the special investigation into Russian meddling in the elections led by Robert Mueller III closes in on an inner circle of advisers surrounding Trump.

In Russia, accusations of meddling against the government are treated with scorn as spurious and politically motivated, a way for Trump’s enemies to gin up political anger at the embattled president.

Still, Flynn’s phone calls fit into a timeline that saw Putin react leniently after Obama’s administration expelled 35 diplomats, and ignore recommendations from his own Foreign Ministry to immediately expel 35 U.S. diplomats in retaliation.

In late December 2016, Flynn called Kislyak to convince him that Russia should not retaliate against the expulsion of 35 Russian diplomats by the Obama administration. The move was taken in response to allegations backed by U.S. intelligence agencies that Russia-backed hackers stole information from the Democratic National Committee’s e-mail servers and sought to swing the election for Trump.

Later that day, Putin issued a surprise directive: Russia would not respond immediately to the expulsion of the diplomats. Eventually, once efforts to repair U.S.-Russian relations stalled under Trump, Putin did cut the staff of U.S. diplomats and other government interests in Russia.